pure XML

[Peter Ring]

Hi Kevin,

I completely agree!

These days, walls between companies become porous. "The whole company" 
involves suppliers, customers, and competitors. Low transaction costs 
are more important than short-lived optimization. Anyway there are large 
sunk costs in establishing a publishing infrastructure; take a look at 
the estimated costs of TEI, DocBook and DITA at www.ohloh.net. 
Publishing infrastructure has become commoditized, at least on a 
component level. DocBook was originally designed as an interchange 
standard, and subsequently became a publishing framework. The NLM/NCBI 
Journal Archiving DTD was developed as an archival standard, and is now 
also becoming an authoring standard.

TEI, DocBook and DITA became ubiquitous exactly because these public 
standards were designed from the ground to be adapted and customized, 
not because they magically solve any problems out of the box. It is 
still your customers, your process, your responsibility -- even if 80% 
of the effort can be shared.

The complaint that FrameMaker does not save 'pure XML' might actually 
have (had) some merit; the DocBook starter application used to mess 
things up somewhat (eg the <indexterm> problem). We just got FM9 at 
work, at I look forward to see if things are better now.

By the way, public standards are not necessarily free. One of the 
standard jokes about the SGML standard (ISO 8879:1986) is that 'nobody 
owns the standard'; ISO's pricing policy has kept the number of people 
who do own a copy of the Standard at an absolute minimum. [NOT the 
comp.text.sgml FAQ]


kind regards
Peter Ring


On 02/17/2010 09:02 AM, Kevin Farwell wrote:

<snip/>
> As far as customizing public standards, I say have at it. Why should
> anyone settle for something that doesn't suit their needs exactly?
> Let's face it, public standards are built to accommodate everything,
> and one size fits all really means it fits nobody well. Clothing off
> the rack should be tailored. Nobody uses the format templates shipped
> with FrameMaker without customizing them. The big selling point of
> standards, after the word "free," is interoperability, but I don't
> see that as a benefit. Macy's doesn't tell Gimbels, so what value is
> there in them being able to share information? Departments within
> companies shouldn't go off on their own, but it isn't a problem if
> the whole company does.
>
> Kevin
>
<snip/>